Sunday, December 30, 2012

Wolf center offers a howling good time

Dec 29, 2012
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Alex
Spitzer, Educator/Volunteer Coordinator at the Wolf Conservation
Center, feeds Alawa pieces of raw chicken. Visitors came to see the
wolves at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, NY on Dec. 29,
2012. (Tabitha Pearson Marshall for The Journal News)

Tabitha Pearson Marshall for The Journal News

Written by

Randi Weiner

Alex Spitzer, educator/volunteer coordinator at the Wolf
Conservation Center, feeds Alawa pieces of raw chicken. Visitors came to
see the wolves at the center in South Salem on Saturday. The center has
housed several packs of gray, red and Mexican wolves. / Photos by
Tabitha Pearson Marshall for The Journal

If you go

SOUTH SALEM
— The nearly 30 adults and children stood balanced on ice, snow and
dirt in the frigid air Saturday morning, howling toward the hilltop
where the wolves waited.

At a signal from
wolf educator Alex Spitzer, the crowd quieted, and from the air came the
unmistakeable sound of real wolves howling in response. The 15 or so
children broke into grins as the group headed up the steep hillside
pathway to visit Zephyr and Alawa, the ambassador wolves of the Wolf
Conservation Center.

“I
liked when the wolves howled back,” said 7-year-old Greta Radcliff of
Manhattan, who was at the site with her parents and two younger sisters
on Saturday for one of the center’s Pack Chat children’s programs,
adding, “I didn’t know all the kinds of wolves” there were.

The
Wolf Conservation Center has housed several packs of gray, red and
Mexican wolves on what now is 27 acres of undeveloped land since it was
created as a nonprofit organization in 1999. Nearly 8,000 people visit
the preserve during the year, participating in several on-site programs
including the Pack Chats, Evening Howl programs, Wolf Day Camp and
environment lecture series. Another 30,000 to 33,000 people get visits
from arctic wolf Atka, the center’s off-site ambassador, or spend time
with center staff learning about wolves.

Programs
like Pack Chat help fund the center, which has a budget of about
$500,000 a year. Feeding the wolves is not as difficult as it could be,
since local police and hunters drop off deer carcasses either killed on
the highway or already butchered for venison steaks. The wolves mostly
eat hooved animals in the wild, although on Saturday they also had a bit
of chicken and bananas.

“A
lot of the stories that kids are told about wolves, like Little Red
Riding Hood, aren’t necessarily true,” Spitzer said with a smile. “This
is just to make it a little bit of a fun program and give kids a chance
to see wolves. It’s the biggest thing we can do.”

Saturday’s Pack Chat drew a family of cousins of center volunteer Samantha Smith, including several from Frisco, Texas.

“I love it,” said Kristi Smith, 25, of Darien, Conn., who was keeping
her mother, Karen Smith, also of Darien, company as other family
members stood by the wire fence, staring at a male red wolf in the
distance that had not been socialized to humans.

“You
get more of an understanding and appreciation for wildlife,” said Letty
Williams, Karen Smith’s sister-in-law and grandmother of 5-year-old
Bobby and 3-year-old Brendan Williams of Frisco. The boys said they
really liked to hear the wolves howl. After the program was over, they
and the adults stood exchanging howls with Atka through the fence.

Winter
is wolf time. The animals that were on view for visitors were in full
coat and active, a difference from their summer behavior when they would
rather sleep. Siblings Zephyr and Alawa, who at 18 months old weighed
80 and 70 pounds, respectively, had been raised to be comfortable with
people. That didn’t stop Alawa from growling and nipping at her brother
as the visitors walked up to their enclosure, a reminder that even
wolves socialized to humans were still wild animals.Andrew
Radcliff, 41, Greta’s father, said he brought the family to South Salem
on the recommendation of a friend who had visited the center in the
summer.

“He said
if you come in the winter, it’s a lot more fun. The wolves have their
(winter) coats,’ Radcliff said. He and his family said the trip up from
the city was definitely worth it.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone